I had an experience the other day in which a dude called upon me to prop up his ego. I’d love to tell you the particulars, but I feel like I’d like this post to survive into perpetuity, and I don’t want this person, who is, after all, a friend, to feel any more targeted than he has to. (I hate writing about people I know.) In very broad strokes, he asked me for career advice.

Embedded in his inquiries were several assumptions:

That his qualifications were amazing, definitely far more amazing than mine;

That I had, as a matter of course, to agree that he was really very smart, indeed, of He-Man-like intelligence;

That he surely deserved all sorts of honours and fancy positions, unlike other people;

That it was beyond the bounds of rational discourse to deny any of the above.

In the process of making these inquiries, he managed to repeatedly insult me in various ways that I’m sure he wasn’t aware of. I mean, the funny thing about this friend is that I have to admit that he has been super-supportive of a lot of things I’ve done over the past few years, to a degree that he was not obligated by friendship to be. And indeed, I don’t think it’s exactly that he thinks that I am not (a) well-qualified; (b) smart; or (c) deserving of honours and fancy positions. It’s more that he thinks my aspirations lie in other directions, and he’s not wrong about that. (We’ve known each other a long time.)

And after all, he was asking my advice. Sort of.

Nonetheless, I assume that many of you have had this kind of conversation with someone, in which they prop themselves up, constantly, often at your expense, expecting you to smilingly follow along and sing his praises. I assume that many of you would also report that the people with whom you had these exchanges were dudes. Indeed, on the other end of the phone line, Rebecca Solnit kept popping into my head, particularly this fragment:

Now, I have spent a long time in the feminist blogosphere. I have read my fellow Harpies, and Sady, and Kate Harding and Megan Carpentier and a hundred other ass-kicking, no-holds-barred women who don’t put up with any shit from dudes. I am not a shrinking wallflower on the internet, and in real life not terribly much of one either, though I do sometimes hear from people who read me on the internet first, and then met me, that I don’t seem to be what they expected. So you would expect that I handed my dude friend his ass on the phone, right? You would have liked to have been a fly on the wall for the witty smackdown, yes?

Wrong.

Here is what I did. I meekly told him I did indeed find him intelligent, qualified, etc etc, told him I even thought my employer (who had just fired me) might hire him, did not laugh when he spoke of himself as though he were king of the smarts, and hung up the phone wishing him well. I simpered, you guys. I hemmed and hawed and let his ego feed at the trough of my apparent approval of the maneuver he was doing.

Then, a few minutes later, I looked out my window, and yelled, “YOU ARE SUCH A FUCKING DICK.”

I’ve been mad for days about how I reacted to this. Funnily enough, it’s me I’m really angry at, as opposed to my friend, who again, as I type this, is surely going about life life thinking this conversation went swimmingly. I’ve been mad that I didn’t defend myself or my boundaries of comfort in that conversation. I’ve been mad that if I had, I would have felt like I was insulting this person with whom I am, after all, somewhat close, when he just wanted support.

Most of all, I’m mad that in any event, I haven’t that kind of confidence and never will have.

I know, I know, Be A Bitch. But I rarely seem to get my shit together enough to actually accomplish this. It’s not because I’m afraid of the challenge, though, or at least I don’t think so. It’s because in the moment, viscerally, I just don’t feel like I am in the right. You can call it confidence if you like, that I should just nut up and start asserting myself, but I can’t help but feel like what I’d rather is that this overweening self-confidence of this type of man (and assorted non-male-identified folk who do this) be the exception rather than the rule. Sometimes, as in this incident, I am later sure of what I should have said and can easily understand this as a self-esteem issue. But other times, I think I just need the challenge.

I’ve had those discussions that women often have with other women where we note that in a man’s world, we just have to start stepping up to the plate and taking what we want. I agree that the mere gesture of assuming authority is a revolutionary one in a universe that says women don’t belong in positions of authority. But as BeckySharper said when I angrily vented over google chat, the truth is that faking it until you make it only works for so long. It’s true that some men make it through regardless – your last President, Americans, seemed to be a believer in this approach to life – but by and large eventually some version of a Hurricane Katrina comes along and people realize that they’ve hired, or elected, or rewarded in some other way, a dud. (This, I think, is destined to happen to Sarah Palin one day, which is why in some ways I cannot really be afraid of her, but that’s another post.)

And it seems reasonable to me to not want to take that risk with things that you care about, to say that you will not be the person who blows everyone away by sheer force of bombast but who rather has ideas worth sharing and who is open to learning. That you are not so committed to your ambitions that you make every issue about you. But therein lies the rub, because the more you are open to the idea that you are wrong, the more you doubt and question and criticize yourself, the harder it is to claim your space in the world.

Obviously the answer is a balance, like everything else in the world. There’s no obvious trajectory to choose. You step out, you feel your way, you try to be generous, you try to learn, you try to teach what little you know and you accept that you don’t know everything.

But every once in awhile, usually when I’ve too much time on my hands for self-reflection, the confidence of people like this friend of mine haunt me. Think of all the things I might be able to do in the world if I had the chutzpah, and the talent for self-promotion! Think of all the things women could do.

But then I fear we might all become some kind of progressive Sarah Palins.

17 Responses to “On Women and Chutzpah”

It’s not easy to buck a lifetime of conditioning, even for those who have been taking Bitch to zen levels for years. So don’t be too hard on yourself for it.

Also, he’s your friend, of course you wanted to make him feel better. I daresay you’d have reacted similarly to a female friend with the same conversation. Would it have annoyed you as much afterward? I don’t know.

I don’t know that I made him feel better so much as confirmed an already unreasonably high impression of himself, though.

I guess it would have, but women don’t tend to talk to each other about careers in the one-uppy way. We do that more around themes of body issues, it seems to me. Social conditioning for sure, not suggesting it’s biological, of course.

I have a friend like this, he just finished his masters and got a job super fast in his field and bought a house and is getting married to a lovely girl, but he thinks that everything he has accomplished has been completely on his own merit. He likes to give advice his friends who have done less well (like me) about being more like him, but is blind to all of the things in his life that gave him a head start.

I have tried to talk to him about this, but have never been able to get any traction, so we don’t hang out very often and he wonders why we have drifted apart. *shrug*

I think for me what you’re describing is a processing issue. In the moment I’m giving the person I’m talking to the benefit of the doubt and it’s only when I play it over again a few times in my head that I realize what was really going on and I become angry at myself for not responding differently. I wish I knew how to (accurately) do that kind of processing in the moment.

While it is more common in men, I have to say that one of my oldest female friends does this the whole time and appears to have no idea how frustrating it is to be put down constantly in the need to bolster her ego.

It used to just be academic then job success then money earned then weight-gain (mine) via weight loss (hers) and now she spends her time telling me how to parent my children (as a side issue she does not have children herself). I really should tell her where to get off..and yet I can’t bring myself to because we’ve known each since we were 13 years old.

@emilyanne — I recently carried out a friend dump, and it was really hard to do. My former friend was incapable of being happy for me unless she was doing at least as well as I was. I lost weight and could fit into her clothes, and she said I must have looked obscene in her dress with my enormous breasts. When I pointed out that I was currently her size, she said, “Oh, well, maybe I have gotten smaller.” Of course. She also got jealous when I got into cycling, since that was *her* activity, and she told a mutual friend that I had no business having such a fancy bike “since aus is just starting out” (the underlying message being, “since aus is clearly not going to stick with this” — which, p.s., I totally have). When I broke up with an abusive long-term boyfriend, she was happy about it — because now I was not “perfect” so she could relate to me. It was not fun and not easy to cut the ties, but I am way happier now. We had been friends for 4 years, but the time had come.

I have never understood people who have to measure themselves against others. I am heinously competitive, but only with myself. I am always happy when people fall in love, get promotions, go to school, have babies…is it too much to ask for the same consideration?

Anyhoodle, I haven’t noticed that men do this more often than women do. I will start paying attention, though. Thanks for the thought food, PS!

I am good enough at Being a Bitch (or, more simply, perhaps just bitchy enough) that I’ve weeded out the friends in my life like this, but the mentality is still inescapable. I was in an interview once where I was asked whether I had experience performing a specific task, which would be above my pay grade but not unimaginable at my level. I gave a very honest answer: that I hadn’t had the chance to do so at my old firm because few juniors got to do such a thing, and I wasn’t comfortable putting myself forward and demanding the opportunity when there were people above me who hadn’t had the chance yet; that I felt that it becomes less about self-confidence and more about ego to aggressively self-promote as the group of people you’re surrounded by becomes more and more exceptional. The interviewer looked at me like I had just admitted I never learned to read.

The problem isn’t just men like this, it’s that they’ve structured so many business models to assume that if you’re not also manically egotistical, it must be because you’re deficient.

When PSoul was gchatting with me about this my mind kept scrolling like one of those news crawls on Fox News: what a dick what a dick what a dick what a dick….

I’ve definitely had moments where I completely failed to Be A Bitch because I was stunned into silence by the complete confidence with which people spewed utter dick-itude. (After all, I went to school in the South with a whole lotta Christian evangelicals.) And yes, it was often dick-itude spewed by jackass, overconfident white men who’d read too much Ayn Rand.

We’ve all had those moments where we come up with the classic Dorothy Parker-like rejoinder, hours after the conversation’s ended. I am STILL coming up with the perfect retort to conversations I had 10 years ago with a former boss who overconfidently talked out his ass all the time. It really does get under one’s skin, and I completely agree that it’s WAY more of a male thing, because being a pompous blowhard is nearly always a male privilege.

“But therein lies the rub, because the more you are open to the idea that you are wrong, the more you doubt and question and criticize yourself, the harder it is to claim your space in the world.”

I think this is also a matter of gendered social conditioning. For men, if they do one thing wrong and 99 things right, that one wrong thing is often seen as isolated incident, an anomaly. For women in the same scenario, that one wrong thing somehow ends up largely invalidating the 99 right things in our own minds, and too often in the minds of others as well. We’re taught that we have to be perfect, polite, nurturing, quiet, etc. The idea persists that women don’t “naturally” belong in certain spheres; and there are still plenty of men who want to maintain the status quo, or, at the least, have been so thoroughly saturated with the Kool Aid that they just believe this idea without much question. These men tend to point to every little misstep a woman makes as “proof” that women can’t hack it in positions of power and prestige (in other words, as proof of their own natural superiority).

In theory, I think that confident bombast (based on the many things we do right) can co-exist peacefully in women with an openness to being wrong (because we’re all wrong on occasion). It’s just hard to achieve that balance given the above.

@Tall: Yes, very true. A commenter a couple weeks ago called that the “Right to be Wrong”, which is a male but not female privilege. (Was it you? Or someone else? It’s a great phrase and it’s totally been added to my lexicon.)

No it wasn’t me, but that one phrase pretty much encapsulates my entire (very wordy) second paragraph. Ah, to be succinct!

PS – I don’t know how you feel about this and it certainly depends on the dynamics of your friendship, but would it make a difference to write your friend an email laying out what made you uncomfortable about the conversation? I don’t tend to do well with responding to situations like this as they’re happening, but I have had success with hashing things out post-convo in written form. Because really, this isn’t just about some lack of confidence or whatever on your part; it’s also about the way men are socialized to be bulls in the china shop when it comes to blasting their own horns. Just as many women (myself included) could benefit from a dose of confident bombast, many men could benefit from a push in the other direction. It’s about achieving a balance for both sexes.

(Which isn’t to say you have some responsibility to educate him – you don’t. But if it might help him be less of a dick in the future, and help you get some of this off your chest, it may be worth a shot.)

Reading this, I just can’t help thinking of Audre Lorde’s quote about the inability of the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house. Should women combat harmful gender roles that equate femininity with indecision and an outsize capacity to feel intimidated. Absolutely. But should women do so by acting just as douchily egotistical as the guys? Absolutely not. What’s sad is that this attitude is more or less expected of the new generation of employees. Even while I’m still an undergraduate, I’m expected to make connections with people in high places and brag about myself to them. (My parents put the pressure on me for this, and as an Ivy Leaguer it’s particularly palpable.) I have no problem with word-of-mouth networking, and indeed, as I’m an extremely candid person I have no problem playing up some of my positive aspect, but other times to me it just feels like prostitution of personalities—this is also how I felt while applying to colleges three years ago, particularly when writing essays—and it makes me extremely uncomfortable, and I’m positive I’m not the only one. If the only way to get ahead in the world is to sacrifice your own personal boundaries and comfort zones, particularly when the people in question are women who by their own innate nature are modest (obviously nobody’s free from patriarchal influence, but some people are just naturally more modest or unassuming than others), to the point where it begins to tax you mentally and emotionally, something’s seriously fucked up. We need more assertive women, but we also need workplaces that accept and reward less traditionally male modes of behavior.

@Cat: Ugh, you hit a chord with the college essays thing. The whole idea of writing a personal statement is a ridiculous part of the American system (no offense to all y’all who went through it, it has many strengths too!). I’m going to college to LEARN, so judge me on my academic merits, not on some essay that doesn’t even have anything to do with what I want to study. Gah. /OT

Pilgrim Soul, I do know where you’re coming from – sometimes people’s unawareness of their own limitations is breathtaking. And men are more commonly affected. But I do wonder whether this is really a situation where you have to be a bitch – no-one likes to have their faults pointed out to them, and unless someone asked me to point theirs out, I probably wouldn’t. (Although I also try not to give false praise…)

This post is SO dead on: I have a female friend who is just like your male acquaintance–she has this incredible self-confidence that lately has grown to the point of grating arrogance. From jobs and awards to the boys she’s dating, our conversations are always about how great she is, how she’s almost guaranteed to get X thing, or what she’s going to do next. On one hand, I get horribly annoyed when I listen to her and I also wish that her confidence was the exception rather than the rule. But then I wonder, “Is this what should aspire to–this overwhelmingly confident assurance that I can get what I want?”

It is a quandary indeed: I struggle daily to break out of the polite, unassuming behaviors ingrained in me and assert myself more. But I also don’t want to become that unappealingly arrogant. So I continue to seek that balance, and I believe there are many female role models surrounding us who stand up for themselves and their ideals without degrading into overconfident posers.

Very late to this, I’ve not often run into this situation with friends, or people my age. The only one I can think of is an American friend of mine, who’s a year younger, and rather less experienced (a big condensate of rich white male privilege, although his mother is Asian, since it barely shows) who’d argue with me and one of my (girl)friends about, mainly, politics and history. And who’d sulk for hours when he got the inevitable smackdown. The funny thing was that it showed that even though he should know better, he still never expects us to disagree, or prove him wrong. It’s as if we should shut up, be pretty, and agree with him while making admiring noises.Ugh.

Otherwise, I don’t know how this happened, but I’m not that used to being underestimated, and I don’t think I’m particularly arrogant; I very much dislike having to self-promote, and writing personal statements to get into grad school was torture.
I have a short temper, and get exceedingly pissed off when people condescend to me, but there are always occasions where it’s better to shut up and smile. And it’s infuriating.